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I don't ever remember a structure being above the Garrison Pub even to this day!! Where did that come from??
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In the previous seasons you can see huge steel structures above the bar. The thing is, a LOT of years has been passed since that.
Just give Dave Filoni free reign to write/produce whatever show or movie in the SW universe he wants. Mans a fucking genius.
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@jshwlr THIS! That man is the closest person Disney currently have who knows what's where and how. I lowkey believe he single handedly could save the franchise at its current state.
Review by Andrew Bloom
VIP9
[4.6/10] If I could make one rule for Westworld and only one rule, it would be this -- no more twists. This series is addicted to pulling the rug out from under its audience, trying to pull a fast one to make viewers say “whoa”, or otherwise recontextualize everything they’ve seen so far, that it’s completely damaging to its attempts to tell stories, establish character, and convey meaning. When everything the audience sees is just a setup for a subversion, none of it matters, and the viewer is left with nothing to do but wait for the punchline.
So let’s just hit a sampling of the twists that show up in “Crisis Theory”, the finale of the show’s third season: All of the modern hosts were originally based off of Dolores. Serac is a puppet being controlled by Rehoboam. Dolores and Caleb didn’t meet by chance, but because Dolores selected him after his brain was scanned in a Delos soldier training exercise. The real(?) William is dead and is being replaced by a host duplicate. Hale has commandeered Dolores’s tools and people and is planning her own robo-revolution.
But the biggest one is this -- Dolores isn’t trying to destroy humanity; she’s just trying to give it free will, the sort of free will she had to fight and claw for. She picked Caleb not because of his capacity for violence, but because of his ability to choose and his willingness to show mercy, even when he didn’t have to.
That is trite, but at least it’s positive. It’s a weird left turn after so long fumfering about everyone’s cruelty. Caleb is not part of some devious extinction plot. Maeve will fight for a cause greater than just reunion with her daughter. Instead, they both choose to undo the shackles on humanity with the belief that what results can be beautiful and that beauty should be preserved.
The problems with this message are two-fold. First and foremost, “Crisis Theory” dramatizes it with an endless series of absolutely mind-numbing, on-the-nose monologues. For all the faux-profundity the show aspires to, the language it uses scans like half-formed action movie dialogue in the dull ten minutes before the special effects budget kicks in, only stretched out over forty-five minutes. There is no point too small, no observation too mundane, no moral too obvious, that Westworld can’t turn it into some ponderous B.S. speech that gilds the lily to the point of exhaustion.
The second is that this message about creative destruction feels contradictory and hopelessly naive. The message is that Rehoboam is a palliative that delayed the fall of civilization, but that like Westworld itself, civilization needs to burn in order for something better, less oppressive, and less asphyxiating, to emerge from the ashes. I wouldn’t exactly call that idea dangerous, but it smacks of someone who took their first semester poli sci class and declares “this is all too complicated, what we really need is to just start a revolution!” It’s facile and cliché, two words that, unfortunately, apply to most of Westworld’s brand of philosophy.
It also goes against what the show itself, and its quasi-omniscient A.I., suggest as the consequence of this move. There’s something fair, if conventional, about the show examining the safe but suffocating order versus chaotic but authentic freedom dichotomy and landing on the latter. But this very episode predicts widespread death and destruction, possibly to the point of extinction. At best, you can chalk this up to Dolores connecting with Rehoboam and understanding that this is, at the very least, not a certainty, or believing that spilled blood is the cost of liberty, but the episode just glosses over a pretty big caveat to this whole outrageous freedom idea.
Beyond the twists, beyond the dime store existentialism the show’s been toying with from the beginning, that sort of tack shows once again the grim truth about Westworld -- that’s a vacuous show that thinks it’s smart. The great innovation of season 3 is that, in its best stretches, this series stopped pretending that it had Important Things to Say:tm: or that its plotlines made real sense, and just became entertaining, high class pulp.
If I made the rules, Westworld would lean into that and lean into it hard. Setting loose a bunch of talented actors, to look impossibly stylish, match wits and weapons with one another, and cross and double-cross each other with impeccable direction, locations, production design, is well within this series’s grasp to do. When the show stops aiming for a profundity it can’t hit anymore; it is still a fun, slick production worth enjoying for its shallow charms. If that was the show we got on a week-to-week basis, it might not turn into a favorite, but it would least have its appeal as quasi-cinematic sci-fi brain candy to fall back on each episode.
But I don’t make the rules, and maybe it’s too late for them anyway. Maybe Westworld is just irrevocably broken. You can only throw twist after twist at the audience for so long that even good, meat and potatoes storytelling becomes meaningless. You can only let your characters drift so far away from themselves, recontextualize them and recongifgure again and again, before the audience loses all attachment to them. You can only throw so many empty platitudes out there to rot and fester before you reveal your show as trite and intellectually bankrupt.
In season 3, Westworld left the park and ventured into the real world. That was the last barrier for it to cross, the last lingering shred of intriguing possibility from its original premise, and in just eight episodes, the series has already exhausted it. Where is there for the show to go from here? What desperate attempt to top themselves could the creators pull out of their increasingly barren hats? Who’s left standing in the cast with a point and a purpose that hasn’t been muddled and revived and made into an utter hash of a character?
The answer is nowhere, none, and no one. In just twenty-eight episode, Westworld has outlived its premise, outstripped its abilities, and outlasted its usefulness as a television show. Nothing in this series stays dead for long, and a renewal has already been secured, But if artistic achievement were the standard for success rather than bankrolls and buzz, the series would be sent to the Valley Beyond and never allowed to sully its own misspent potential again.
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@r_lewis Thanks! And yeah, it's so hard when the characters keep getting used as fodder for some twist rather than the show allowing them to just be who they are and let us know what they want.
Review by Andrew Bloom
[5.8/10] Look, trying to diagnose just one problem as “the key” to what’s wrong with Westworld is like pulling one bullet out of Scarface and declaring him cured. But the one that bugs me the most in “Decoherence” is this -- the show pretends that it is very smart and profound, when it is deeply, deeply trite and dumb.
Maybe I’m just too old and jaded for this mumbo jumbo. If you watched The Matrix in theaters, or sat agape in front of the T.V. watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even rode the highs and lows of Battlestar Galactica before, this show’s overextended points about identity and choice are simply old hat. For a new generation, wowed by the production design and quality acting, this may feel like a breath of fresh air and something truly insightful. But for old hands like yours truly, it can’t help but feel tired and done.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s something cool conceptually about William having conversations with different versions of himself and debating whether or not he’s the author of his own story or just a character in one that’s been dictated to him. (It’s also a nice excuse to bring Jimmi Simpson back to play Young William again.) Having different reflections of his former self speak up to either excuse past behavior by blaming it on his upbringing, the park, or balancing it out with his good deeds, makes for a visually striking device if nothing else.
The problem is that this is Westworld so the dialogue, and its attendant overwritten colloquies about whether or not we have free will and self-taunts about the darkness that lies in the hearts of men, elicits more eye-rolls than solemn nods in response. To be honest, I think I’m just over William as a character. The battle for his soul mostly ceased to be interesting after season 1. Killing his own daughter should provide more places to take the character, but death is so cheap on this show that it doesn't mean much. Ed Harris still makes the most of the material, but this whole “are you a villain in this story or a passenger in your own life” dichotomy is tired and cliched.
What I find more surprising is that I’m also struggling to care about Maeve this season. She was always one of the show’s more compelling characters, given her more complex motivations and the snark and charm of her personality. The problem for her in season 3 is that so much of her material is clearly wheel-spinning until the inevitable confrontation between her and Dolores. I appreciate that “Decoherence” tries to use this downtime while her body reprints to explore her character a little, but it doesn't really tell us anything we don’t already know.
We do see that Maeve has her superpowers back. That’s more of a plot point than a character development, since presumably her ability to dictate the behavior of the Hosts will come into play somehow when Dolores sends her army in, or Bernard and Stubbs (and maybe William?) try to interfere, or she has to take over big red Kool Aid Man-style wall-busters to win the day. But while it’s likely important that the show set that up, we’ve already done the Warworld routine and seeing her thump goons or bring back the “real” Hector so that he can be offed for “real” ten minutes later does nothing.
There is something to her having a chat with Dolores (or an earlier version of her) who seems more detached and sanguine about what has to be done than usual, in order to set up that confrontation down the road. The whole “we’re not so different, you and I” tenor of the exchange is also a cliché. But it at least introduces some moral complications to the whole thing, where both Dolores and Maeve think they’re fighting for their people, their loved ones, just in different ways. There’s not much new to that, but it’s a solid enough wrinkle and a clever enough way to put them face to face before they’re actually face to face.
That just leaves Hale, who wasn’t interesting to me before she was just another Host, and who isn’t much more interesting to me now. The character should be more compelling conceptually. For one thing, the fact that she’s a double agent, theoretically working for Serac against Dolores while actually working for Dolores against Serac. For another, there’s genuine intrigue, and something that does feel a little unique, about Hale’s life bleeding into Dolores’s programming, to where Host-Hale genuinely care for real-Hale’s family, to the point that it reveals her as not the real Hale to Serac.
But despite that, she feels like a pointless character, who exists only to be the product of various schemes and counter-schemes, ploys and counter-ploys, and otherwise walk around gray hallways shooting and crushing things. If this show aspired to be any old dumb action movie, that would perfeclty fine. But it wants to convince us that it’s saying something meaningful amid all this indulgent destruction and twisty nonsense, and at the very least, Hale is a pretty meager vessel to support that sort of storytelling.
So instead we just get surprises. William has decided that his debate about reality or causality or mentality is pointless, and he’s found his purpose, and is now on Team Bernard. Maeve is now not just working for Serac and trying to take out Dolores because she wants to reunite with her daughter, but because she wants revenge on Dolores for orchestrating the death of Hector. And Robo-Hale has lost the one thing she had a genuine emotional connection to -- real Hale’s family -- leaving her as another potential wildcard/vengeance-seeker amid all of this craziness.
There’s nothing wrong with those developments. They’re solid, basic, character beats. A villain becomes a useful ally. A hero gets new motivation. A tweener finds their cause more complicated. But Westworld in general and “Decoherence” in particular seems to think these events are freighted with irrepressible meaning, when they’re stock plot points and character twists wrapped in the same dime store philosophical ramblings the show’s had on offer for a while now.
I don’t mind Westworld trying to be smart or contemplative amid its pulpy thrills; I just wish it succeeded.
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@andrewbloom "I just wish it succeeded." Lol. The struggle is real.
I got to the point that I'm already satisfied with the visuals and whatever comes, plot wise, I'll take it. This season lost me at the first half. I regret had recommended it to people. They might be mad at me watching this season. Hehe
Booo, no murderous games this episode
also, out of all those 201 players, they're divided just in the middle between continuing the game or not
what a coincidence
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is that the only thing you find unlikely in the series so far?
Until this point, Bebop is a fun anime with a neat aesthetic. This episode changed a lot of that for me. The montage as Spike is falling from the cathedral is magnificent.
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@filmboicole got it, that makes sense (it seems they changed the right order for a messed one)
Until this point, Bebop is a fun anime with a neat aesthetic. This episode changed a lot of that for me. The montage as Spike is falling from the cathedral is magnificent.
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@filmboicole hmmm this episode is about Ed, nothing about falling cathedrals
Until this point, Bebop is a fun anime with a neat aesthetic. This episode changed a lot of that for me. The montage as Spike is falling from the cathedral is magnificent.
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@palharesf agreed! And since the site uses season/episode naming for URLs rather than something that would stick through with episode title, the comment doesn't stick to the episode I wrote it for.
Just give Dave Filoni free reign to write/produce whatever show or movie in the SW universe he wants. Mans a fucking genius.
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So true! I’m falling in love with the show every episode once again because all of it is just so perfectly timed and designed and acted... I just hope they don’t F it up in the end :sweat_smile::fingers_crossed_tone2:
The deadliest sniper in the world is an Iranian!!!
Chris Kyle made 160 successful shots
Abdulrasul Zarin is an Iranian sniper who had 700 successful shots!!
Chris Kyle's rifle was the most modern sniper in the world although Abdulrasul Zarin was shooting with a simple gun!
and Chris Kyle killed people during the USA attack to Iraq but Abdulrasul Zarin only killed Iraqian soldiers during Iraq attack to Iran. in the other hand Chris Kyle is a murderer but Abdulrasul Zarin is a defender.
160 to 700 is a long way for Chris Kyle to be the deadliest sniper in the world.loading replies
@mahyurr I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that this movie portrayed him as the 'Deadliest Sniper In The World'
The movie and the promotional material had a line of dialogue and tagline "The Deadliest Sniper in US Military history"
Review by Andrew Bloom
[4.6/10] If I could make one rule for Westworld and only one rule, it would be this -- no more twists. This series is addicted to pulling the rug out from under its audience, trying to pull a fast one to make viewers say “whoa”, or otherwise recontextualize everything they’ve seen so far, that it’s completely damaging to its attempts to tell stories, establish character, and convey meaning. When everything the audience sees is just a setup for a subversion, none of it matters, and the viewer is left with nothing to do but wait for the punchline.
So let’s just hit a sampling of the twists that show up in “Crisis Theory”, the finale of the show’s third season: All of the modern hosts were originally based off of Dolores. Serac is a puppet being controlled by Rehoboam. Dolores and Caleb didn’t meet by chance, but because Dolores selected him after his brain was scanned in a Delos soldier training exercise. The real(?) William is dead and is being replaced by a host duplicate. Hale has commandeered Dolores’s tools and people and is planning her own robo-revolution.
But the biggest one is this -- Dolores isn’t trying to destroy humanity; she’s just trying to give it free will, the sort of free will she had to fight and claw for. She picked Caleb not because of his capacity for violence, but because of his ability to choose and his willingness to show mercy, even when he didn’t have to.
That is trite, but at least it’s positive. It’s a weird left turn after so long fumfering about everyone’s cruelty. Caleb is not part of some devious extinction plot. Maeve will fight for a cause greater than just reunion with her daughter. Instead, they both choose to undo the shackles on humanity with the belief that what results can be beautiful and that beauty should be preserved.
The problems with this message are two-fold. First and foremost, “Crisis Theory” dramatizes it with an endless series of absolutely mind-numbing, on-the-nose monologues. For all the faux-profundity the show aspires to, the language it uses scans like half-formed action movie dialogue in the dull ten minutes before the special effects budget kicks in, only stretched out over forty-five minutes. There is no point too small, no observation too mundane, no moral too obvious, that Westworld can’t turn it into some ponderous B.S. speech that gilds the lily to the point of exhaustion.
The second is that this message about creative destruction feels contradictory and hopelessly naive. The message is that Rehoboam is a palliative that delayed the fall of civilization, but that like Westworld itself, civilization needs to burn in order for something better, less oppressive, and less asphyxiating, to emerge from the ashes. I wouldn’t exactly call that idea dangerous, but it smacks of someone who took their first semester poli sci class and declares “this is all too complicated, what we really need is to just start a revolution!” It’s facile and cliché, two words that, unfortunately, apply to most of Westworld’s brand of philosophy.
It also goes against what the show itself, and its quasi-omniscient A.I., suggest as the consequence of this move. There’s something fair, if conventional, about the show examining the safe but suffocating order versus chaotic but authentic freedom dichotomy and landing on the latter. But this very episode predicts widespread death and destruction, possibly to the point of extinction. At best, you can chalk this up to Dolores connecting with Rehoboam and understanding that this is, at the very least, not a certainty, or believing that spilled blood is the cost of liberty, but the episode just glosses over a pretty big caveat to this whole outrageous freedom idea.
Beyond the twists, beyond the dime store existentialism the show’s been toying with from the beginning, that sort of tack shows once again the grim truth about Westworld -- that’s a vacuous show that thinks it’s smart. The great innovation of season 3 is that, in its best stretches, this series stopped pretending that it had Important Things to Say:tm: or that its plotlines made real sense, and just became entertaining, high class pulp.
If I made the rules, Westworld would lean into that and lean into it hard. Setting loose a bunch of talented actors, to look impossibly stylish, match wits and weapons with one another, and cross and double-cross each other with impeccable direction, locations, production design, is well within this series’s grasp to do. When the show stops aiming for a profundity it can’t hit anymore; it is still a fun, slick production worth enjoying for its shallow charms. If that was the show we got on a week-to-week basis, it might not turn into a favorite, but it would least have its appeal as quasi-cinematic sci-fi brain candy to fall back on each episode.
But I don’t make the rules, and maybe it’s too late for them anyway. Maybe Westworld is just irrevocably broken. You can only throw twist after twist at the audience for so long that even good, meat and potatoes storytelling becomes meaningless. You can only let your characters drift so far away from themselves, recontextualize them and recongifgure again and again, before the audience loses all attachment to them. You can only throw so many empty platitudes out there to rot and fester before you reveal your show as trite and intellectually bankrupt.
In season 3, Westworld left the park and ventured into the real world. That was the last barrier for it to cross, the last lingering shred of intriguing possibility from its original premise, and in just eight episodes, the series has already exhausted it. Where is there for the show to go from here? What desperate attempt to top themselves could the creators pull out of their increasingly barren hats? Who’s left standing in the cast with a point and a purpose that hasn’t been muddled and revived and made into an utter hash of a character?
The answer is nowhere, none, and no one. In just twenty-eight episode, Westworld has outlived its premise, outstripped its abilities, and outlasted its usefulness as a television show. Nothing in this series stays dead for long, and a renewal has already been secured, But if artistic achievement were the standard for success rather than bankrolls and buzz, the series would be sent to the Valley Beyond and never allowed to sully its own misspent potential again.
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@andrewbloom Yep, feels like WW is indeed irrevocably broken. Next season will feature exciting sword fighting scenes with multiple Williams and/or Bernards and we'll have to guess which one is the truly free one and which one is controlled by Dolores, Hale, Robom, or God-Meave sigh
Shout by María Sánchez
Damn Dolores, you were always right.
This episode was more emotional than I expected to see in the season finale.
It was really difficult to see how all the memories of Dolores were erased. That woman has been through a lot in her different lives.
I'm glad Maeve is alive and helping to "save" the new world.
Halle is fucking crazy, she turned into a monster, that I actually I'm excited to see in the new season.
This episode gave us a closure and the opportunity for new adventures.
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@messtix I wouldn't get too sad yet, I'm sure her clones still have her memories and I bet you someone kills off one and they rebuild another Dolores robot and put her orb inside it. I just don't see then killing off their main character just yet.
"Two wrongs make a white" Seriously? Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a comedy series. No one watches a series for it to be woke garbage. I'll give it a chance but If I'm getting politics thrown at my face 24/7 I won't finish this series.
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@legallythebear if you thought this show was going to ignore BLM then you don't know Brooklyn Nine-Nine very well
"Two wrongs make a white" Seriously? Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a comedy series. No one watches a series for it to be woke garbage. I'll give it a chance but If I'm getting politics thrown at my face 24/7 I won't finish this series.
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@legallythebear The show has always had slight hints towards injustice and imo they have to make it clear that these characters aren't complacent if they want them to continue being just as likable.
You can't set a cop show in a world that navigates racial and sexual politics and then pussyfoot around the shitty police system. Maybe it could have been more subtle, as could the me too episode, but it's not the politics that are the problem, and it for sure fits into B99's "woke" wheelhouse.
"Two wrongs make a white" Seriously? Brooklyn Nine-Nine is a comedy series. No one watches a series for it to be woke garbage. I'll give it a chance but If I'm getting politics thrown at my face 24/7 I won't finish this series.
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@legallythebear uuuh no. you claim to have watched each episode more than three times yet you still don't get the show at all. "moo moo" was NOT a slight hint. neither was "he said she said". do better.
As dark as what Walter did was, she deserved it. She was completely full of herself and blackmailed Walter for the money. Not to mention she was basically making Jesse's decisions for him. While she may have truly loved him, she would've definitely used that money to continue being an addict. That's most likely the very reason she even wanted the money. I'm not going to feel sympathy now that she's dead.
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@legendaryfang56 Agreed. But I do feel bad for her father, as he really tried to turn it around. Also, makes me dislike Jesse - he was essentially the one who got her back into it - if she hadn't met him, things would have likely turned out better for her.
Pretty good episode... until the last minute. WTF was that? Shouting that she'll kill the guy who's been helping her this whole time? Kinda cringe, and didn't make much sense.
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@ragreynolds ...he repeatedly raped her. I think it's pretty damn understandable that she'd flip the fuck out when told he's been set free.
Absolutely disappointing rehash of the first trilogy. Disney had a real opportunity to do something new and exciting with this ipr but resorted to rushed writing with an extremely compressed story that makes no sense and fails to make anyone care for the characters or events. Emo Kylo is an outstanding metaphor for the whole deal.
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I couldn't agree with you more...the story is completely crap!
This movie is absolutely worse if you understand physics or are a student of physics. Nolan burnt hundreds of millions into this and didn't bother to consult even a high school physics teacher? Does he know what entropy is. Does he think entropy and time are same things? I understand we need to keep our brains at home when watching scifi but the plot is so convoluted and complex that I cannot forgive the stupidity of the premise. This movie is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent movie might be.
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@harshk9 Come on, are we still on this? How Nolan's movie are not "scientifically reliable"? It' a movie! it's like criticize "Iron Man" because the ARC reactor isn't scientifically plausible.
Absolutely disappointing rehash of the first trilogy. Disney had a real opportunity to do something new and exciting with this ipr but resorted to rushed writing with an extremely compressed story that makes no sense and fails to make anyone care for the characters or events. Emo Kylo is an outstanding metaphor for the whole deal.
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Yep, it got so boring at some point that I almost left the theatre.
Quite enjoyed this series/season but didn't like the ending one bit.
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@badcontestant indeed, it was complete bullshit it makes no sense for the MC to abandon his daughter to go back there and play again
A little less June in this episode luckily, but I still don't like her hating rage
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@stijnmaes1992 maybe she's raging because the man responsible for the raping and murdering of women is getting away scot-free?!
SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD
I love pies so much this episode made me want one instead of ruining them for me forever. Also Mike is such a badass. Still can't believe a pussy like Walt killed him.loading replies
@chairene You should put series spoilers for another show in spoiler tags instead of just tagging the entire review. You just spoiled that fact for me because I haven't finished BB. When you only set the check box for spoilers for the episode instead of the actual spoiler, it doesn't obscure it when a user has seen just that episode.
Absolutely disappointing rehash of the first trilogy. Disney had a real opportunity to do something new and exciting with this ipr but resorted to rushed writing with an extremely compressed story that makes no sense and fails to make anyone care for the characters or events. Emo Kylo is an outstanding metaphor for the whole deal.
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I've seen people compare this to the Prequels and I really don't understand how anyone can be so ignorant
Pretty good episode... until the last minute. WTF was that? Shouting that she'll kill the guy who's been helping her this whole time? Kinda cringe, and didn't make much sense.
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@ragreynolds Tuello been helping her so long as it benefits him and his agenda. The man has had his own motivation outside of helping Jude or even Serena this entire time. He's been putting all of this into place to get Waterford as a source and nothing more.
Not to mention, June has been quietly furious from day one. This reaction is totally in character, especially since she's been in Canada and able to more freely express that rage. She thought she was finally getting the justice she deserves from the man who kept her captive and raped her, and then this guy pulls the rug out from under her. Her exploding like that is completely understandable.
Cursing always make an episode better. Luis had some funny one liners in the beginning.
I'm almost certain that Wendell aka Robert Zane gave them notice that he wasn't going to be returning for the final season, so the writers came up with that last minute bullshit. His character was too ethical to be involved in a murder plot, especially over a mugging.
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@datbabyaintmine I didn't understand it as being a murder. From what I recall he said the guy was killed in his cell and that it would have never happened if he hadn't put him there.
It still felt a bit rushed to me as well though.
Absolutely disappointing rehash of the first trilogy. Disney had a real opportunity to do something new and exciting with this ipr but resorted to rushed writing with an extremely compressed story that makes no sense and fails to make anyone care for the characters or events. Emo Kylo is an outstanding metaphor for the whole deal.
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@Jim222001 The problem is that it left very little to give away, not that other way around. It was written in that very Disney/JJ Abrams manner - their entire story was divulged in one or two lines, usually in the introduction to the character. The amount of 'my grandfather' and 'our son' introductions is an example of this, it's one of the first things they teach you not to do in screenplay school, and the backstories of each character were often told to us almost as if they were speaking their autobiography, rather than actually showing us. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, using the word 'hater' is just a way to duck any obligation of logical retort on your part, but it wasn't a good film. A fun film fans will love, yes, but not a good film by more general standards and hopefully not the Star Wars we're going to keep getting. It needs a little less Michael Bay and a little more... well.. Rian Johnson hopefully.
Review by Andrew Bloom
[9.0/10] It’s just supposed to be business. You come in. You sign the forms. You check the boxes. You pay the fine. You don’t get sentimental. There are practical reasons to do this thing, reasons that, coincidentally, involve your continued safety and freedom.
But then you look at the person standing across from you, a person whose joy or pain matters to you, and suddenly you can’t pretend that this is all just a ministerial act, just a necessary concession to the gods of bureaucracy or the legal system. Instead, it becomes something meaningful, something personal, that has an emotional import and connection that makes it more than just business as usual.
So yeah, Kim and Jimmy are married now. After fans reeled from last week’s cliffhanger, it turns out their union isn’t a last desperate act of mutual self-immolation or an impulse borne of bad family lessons. It’s a means of protection, so that if Kim is implicated in Jimmy’s lies once again, she can never be compelled to testify against him as her husband.
And yet, my favorite moment in an episode not short on great moments comes when the two of them face one another in some dingy courtroom, enduring the world’s least romantic wedding ceremony and, against all odds, they’re both moved by it. It’s an outstanding piece of acting from Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who hardly say a word in the scene, but whose faces and subtle changes in expression let slip that however much these two people themselves this wedding is a practicality, it is actually a fleeting moment of romantic transcendence for two people who, whatever their problems, do genuinely love one another.
It sets the tone for “JMM”, an episode where people try to keep things professional, detached, and calm, until it’s contrasted with something much more personal, much more piercing, that wins out.
That’s certainly true for Kim. The episode doesn't spare us the aftermath at Mesa Verde in the wreckage of Saul’s stunt last week. “JMM” involves Kim and Rich low-key groveling before a miffed Kevin Wachtell, all but ready to fire their firm. The partners do the respectful, deferential thing, evincing the sort of demeanor that’s expected between lawyers and their clients, and take responsibility for the failures that led to Wachtell and his company getting fleeced for hundreds of thousands of dollars by Saul. And all it gets them is a dismissive, perturbed kiss off from Kevin, along with the admonition that Kim can do better than her shady beau.
But after walking out the door, Kim decides that she won’t take that lying down. She barges her way back in and is frank with Kevin, about how she really feels, in a way her deferential act wasn’t. She tells him that time and again they advised him against every step that led down this path, and he rejected their advice and barged ahead. It’s not entirely true (or at least omits how much fuel Kim threw on the fire), but she challenges Kevin, approaches him candidly and directly and, most important of all, personally. He respects that and, with a terse but telling response that he’ll see her on Thursday, lets her know that she’s keeping the business.
That directness matters. It builds on a frankness, a realness, that Kevin respects in Kim far more than all the fancy degrees and smarty pants advisors he low-key loathes given his faux-blue collar roots. Truth and honesty gets to him in a way that the usual routine in this situation doesn't and wouldn’t.
There’s a similar contrast between the professional and the personal in Gus’s part of the episode. His first appearance in “JMM” is in a bland boardroom meeting, where fast food CEOs are golf clapping over quarterly percentage increases and plastically delighting over the unprecedented advent of spicy curly fries (which, in fairness, do look pretty tasty).
But the tenor of the conversation changes when we see Gus, Lydia (!), and Peter Schuler behind closed doors. Breaking Bad fans will remember Herr Schuler as the Madrigal exec who had an...unfortunate reaction to the DEA’s investigation. “JMM” plants the seeds for that fatalistic response to external pressure. Schuler is deep in the muck on this, helping to fund Gus’s operation and far enough into it to know and worry about the threat posed by Lalo and the cartel. He’s panicked over auditors, desperate not to get caught, and ready to throw in the towel.
That is, until Gus makes it personal. I don’t want to speculate too deeply about the friendship that Gus and Schuler share, but there’s a familiarity and intimacy to their interactions back at the hotel. Gus persuades his benefactor to stay in the fight by holding him by the arm, looking him (and by extension, the audience) in the eye, and calling back to a shared history together. It’s that gesture, that remembrance, that keeps Schuler mollified enough to give Gus a little more rope, a little more time, far removed from the practiced smiles of the boardroom.
It’s personal for his mole too. Nacho ends up helping Gus burn down one of his own restaurants, under orders from an imprisoned Lalo, to keep the pressure on for the Salamancas and to keep up appearances for Fring. It is, as always, a cool and cathartic sequence on this show, and Gus’s chicken slide grease explosion (which he cooly walks away from, naturally), is a visual highlight.
But for Nacho, however cool this may be, it is something he does not out of loyalty or anger or a sense of rivalry, but because it’s just his job. It’s the necessary evil to protect the thing he actually cares about -- his father. In his meeting with Mike, he tells his new handler that he wants out, that he wants to whisk his dad away somewhere that the cartel can’t get him, because the separation from his “career” and his family is getting thinner by the second.
At the same time, Mike is finding peace on that front. If it weren’t for Kim and Jimmy’s strange but endearing wedding, Mike’s interludes with his granddaughter and daughter-in-law would be the sweetest thing in the episode. He reads to his son’s little girl. He reminisces with Stacey about his boy’s elementary school age antics. And he tells her that he’s better, that he’s accepted what his professional situation is and doesn't want to fight it anymore. More than anyone in the show, Mike is able to find equilibrium by accepting the “hand he’s dealt” in his job, and enjoying the private, personal things that job (hopefully) exists far away and apart from.
He does, however, still have a job to do, and right now that means getting Lalo out of prison so that Gus can force him south of the border where it’s harder for Lalo to call the shots. (And hey, if it gives Gus a chance to take the guy out, all the better). That leads to Mike crossing paths with Saul for the first time in a long time, feeding Saul the dirt (which Mike himself created), to get Lalo out on bail and back to Mexico.Jimmy is genuinely conflicted about it. As ready, willing, and able as he’s been to represent the, shall we say, less than reputable members of the community, becoming a “friend of the cartel” is a horse of a different color. He says as much to Kim in a heartening moment of honesty and candor between them. He thinks about the money, “ranch in Montana” money, but when she asks him if it’s what he wants, he says no. It’s about the thrill of the chase, and about making a life for and with the people he cares about with Jimmy, not necessarily the size of the bankroll. Money’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself for him.
Still, Mike shows up on his doorstep, notes a mysterious benefactor, and between that and the intimidation of a scary crime lord telling him it’s better to be in front of the judge than the cartel, he does what’s expected of him as a zealous advocate and professional. He uses the info that the prosecution’s star witness was coached by “some P.I.” to cast the judge’s ire on the state, and deploys a phony wife and family to show ties to the community. It works! Despite facing a murder charge, Lalo receives a bond and can afford it despite a hefty price tag.
But something’s eating at Jimmy through all of this. In contrast to the fake fiance and moppets he scares up to sway the judge, Jimmy looks across the aisle at the real family of the victim. He sees a poor kid’s mother crying in the courtroom, where he’s helping a cold blooded killer evade justice. Even when it’s done, he peaks at them from around a corner, with his reflection on the marble helping to represent the duality of him in this moment.
It’s too neat and clean to divide this man into Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman. There’s elements of each in the other. But there’s always been a side of the man whose born initials are “JMM” that wants to win at any cost, and a side of him that genuinely cares for people and can feel their pain. There are so many exit ramps in Jimmy’s life, so many places where he could have changed directions and not become the shyster we met in Breaking Bad, and this moment, where the palpable, deeply personal pain felt by this poor family cuts through his typical mercenary craftiness is one of them.
But it’s not to be. Howard Hamlin intervenes, revokes his job offer, and calls Jimmy out for his recent antics with bowling balls and prostitutes and other schemes to mess with Howard’s life. To say that Saul reacts poorly is an understatement. He lashes out at Howard, accusing him of killing Chuck, declaring that a job at HHM is beneath him, loudly and publicly promoting himself as a god, whose stature and grandiosity are so great as to make Howard’s piddling little offer to him infinitesimal.
That’s the thing about Jimmy. He didn’t become a lawyer because of a supposed deep respect and admiration for the law like Chuck. He didn’t do it as a way out and a way forward like Kim. His reasons were always personal. He wanted to impress his brother. He wanted to make Chuck proud. His business life and his private wants were always mixed and matched.
Only here, that motivation has changed. There’s still good in Jimmy, the impulse to gaze at the mournful expressions of a victim’s loved ones and have it give him pause over whether he’s doing the right thing. But the polarity of the personal has changed for him. He’s no longer just in the legal business to earn Chuck’s respect or make a living or fund his dreams with Kim. Now he wants revenge, to show Chuck’s ghost, and every living manifestation of the people and institutions and norms that have made him feel “less than” and looked down upon his whole life that he’s better, and more important, bigger than everyone who once thought less of him.
For Jimmy it always starts out as business, as a transactional thing he does without real consideration. Then, time and again, he has that moment of pause, that moment of restraint, when he thinks about the emotional impact of his choices. But then, inevitably, his personal grievances, his perceived slights, the personal baggage he’s carried for so long, shoves him back toward being Saul Goodman. No deep look into someone’s eyes can change that, however much we might want it to.
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@andrewbloom loved your review, as usual.
My favorite moment was Jimmy blowing up at Howard because Howard called him out on his scamming - and it was JUST like Kim blowing up at Rich for calling her out on the Mesa Verde scam in the previous ep! Jimmy and Kim are perfect for each other lmao...
